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John Donne's Use of Proverbs in His Poetry. Arthur William Pitts Jr Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College

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John Donne's Use of Proverbs in His Poetry. Arthur William Pitts Jr Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1966 John Donne's Use of Proverbs in His Poetry. Arthur William Pitts Jr Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Pitts, Arthur William Jr, "John Donne's Use of Proverbs in His Poetry." (1966). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 1213. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/1213 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received g 7-1180 PITTS, Jr., Arthur William, 1933- JOHN DONNE'S USE OF PROVERBS IN HIS POETRY. Louisiana State University, Ph.D., 1966 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Arthur William Pitts, Jr. 1967 All Rights Reserved JOHN DONNE'S USE OP PROVERBS IN HIS POETRY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Arthur William Pitts, Jr. B.A. Princeton University 1954 M.A. Catholic University of America I960 August, 1966 Acknowledgement I wish to express my gratitude to Professor Thomas A. Kirby and. Professor Fabian Gudas for their helpful comments, and. to Professor Esmond L. Marilla, who directed this study. TABLE OP CONTENTS A b s t r a c t .....................* ........................... i Part I Introduction ........................................ 1 Chapter One THE TRADITION: ORAL AND WRITTEN . 17 Chapter Two PROVERBS USED FOR A L L U S I O N .......... i|.0 Chapter Three PROVERBS USED FOR AMPLIFICATION ...61 Chapter Four PROVERBS USED FOR AUTHORITY.......... 75 Chapter Five THE STYLE OF PROVERBS AND DONNE'S STYLE ............................ 90 Chapter Six DONNE'S COMMON LANGUAGE AND OBSCURITY....................... 103 Conclusion.......................................... 118 Part II Preface to Part I I ..................................122 Proverbial Material in Donne's P o e t r y ............. 121]. List of Works C i t e d ............................... 196 Index to Poems ...................................... 200 Vita 205 Abstract The main tendency in the criticism of Donne's poetry during the past two or three decades has been the effort to read the poetry in the light of the habits of thought of his age. One habit of thought or tradition popular in Donne's time was the use of the proverb as a stylistic device. The extent to which Donne uses proverbs and the ways in which he uses them have not been appreciated. I have attempted to do two things in this study: to identify all the proverbial material which Donne uses; to analyze this material in order to determine Donne's characteristic uses. As a source for the proverbs current in Donne's day I have used primarily M. P. Tilley's Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, which is a compilation from several Renaissance collections of proverbs. Donne uses 267 different proverbs a total of 352 times. His characteristic ways of using proverbs are for allusion, for amplification of the thought or imagery, and for an argument from authority. He sometimes uses proverbs for beginnings and endings. Each of these uses had. been part of the proverb tradition and each was advocated by the Renaissance rhetoricians, such as Thomas Wilson, who did i much to encourage the widespread interest in the proverb during the Renaissance. Donne seldom uses a proverb mechan­ ically. Rather, he adapts it to the context of the poem, and in the freedom, variety, and skill with which he treats proverbs he most resembles Shakespeare. Donne may have learned more about the use of proverbs from the Elizabethan dramatists than from the rhetoricians. Since the interest in proverbs declined, sharply in the late seventeenth century, Donne is one of the last of the major poets, if not the last, to use them extensively. Since the twentieth-century reader is generally unfamiliar with proverbs, a knowledge of them is of consider­ able value for an understanding of Donne’s poetry. Proverbs are often needed to explicate an allusion or to understand the source of the imagery. Most proverbs have some con­ spicuous formal trait, such as ellipsis, or paradox, or alliteration, and Donne sometimes preserves this trait in his usage. Thus, the form of the proverb contributes some­ thing to Donne's style. Proverbs are primarily conventional, oral forms, and a knowledge of Donne's use makes the reader more sensitive to the conventional aspects of Donne’s thought and to the conversational tone of his poetry. Some so-called "conceits," for example, are perhaps more accurately described as proverbs if such description keeps Donne's originality in focus. It is easy for us, too, to exaggerate Donne's learning and to explain a line or passage in terms of iii Renaissance philosophy when, actually, a proverb seems to suffice. Finally, the proverb is characterized by common diction, and, therefore, the many proverbs in Donne contri­ bute greatly to his "common language." Because proverbs are no longer in fashion, however, modern readers sometimes find an obscurity in passages where Donne seems to have been using the common language of his day. 1 INTRODUCTION John Donne, once "kidnapped" by the poets and critics of the twentieth century, has been ransomed gradually over the last twenty or twenty-five years and is now back home in the seventeenth century. No longer is his poetry considered the norm for judging poetry and we do not hear so much any more about the "dissociation of sensibility" which followed Donne. One sign of his return to his own century is that no one today argues that Donne Is a greater poet than Milton; another is that he is much less an inspiration, it seems, for the younger contemporary poets.^ In tracing the strong reaction against Donne as a "modern," Miss Helen Gardner finds its beginning in Rosemond TuveTs wellknown study of the differences between Elizabethan and metaphysical imagery and between Renaissance poetic theory and practice and modern p theory and practice. Much of the ransom was provided by historical studies by scholars reacting to the excesses of the "new criticism." One of these scholars, Douglas Bush, comments on the controversy between the new critics and the historical critics: •^-Helen Gardner, "Introduction," John Donne: A Collec­ tion of Critical Essays, ed. Helen Gardner (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1^62), p . 1 1 . 2 Ibid., p. 1 0 . 2 In the modern view, Johnson's sane but limited neoclassical insight was focused largely upon degenerate extravagances and missed the essen­ tials of the metaphysical genius. These would be, to attempt a brief summary of modern defini­ tions: a philosophic consciousness as the matrix of amatory, religious and other poetry; the con­ centrated, pregnant fusion of thought and feeling, of argumentative logic and passion; the assimila­ tion by an active and unified sensibility of widely different ideas and kinds of experience; the questioning exploration of the individual poet's complex impulses and attitudes in dramatic tension and conflict, rather than the presentation of an assured, preconceived result--a special kind of private rather than public poetry; a texture and tone not in one key but of mingled seriousness and ironic wit, of contrast and surprise; the homely and realistic or the erudite rather than the fanciful or mythological image, and the intellectual, organic, and functional rather than the decorative or illustrative use of it; the language and rhythms of speech, of expressive _ dissonance, instead of the smoothly "poetical."-* Following this excellent summary of several years of criti­ cism, Bush remarks that modern views embodying many of these judgments have been formed after the fact and that some of the ideas are restatements of the views of nineteenth cen­ tury critics who were in the romantic tradition. He then describes the results of several attempts to read Donne In the context of his own day, pointing out that historical criticism would add "important correctives" to the modern view which he has just summarized. These correctives are: that central elements of sensibility and tech­ nique, while exploited by the metaphysical poets with distinctively original results, were present in orthodox theory and practice; that definitions based largely an Donne do not apply very well to other so-called metaphysicals; that such defini­ tions somewhat distort Donne himself by seeing ^English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-lbbQ (Oxford, 1962), pp. 130-131. 3 only psychological and technical novelties and neglecting the current rules of decorum governing the various poetic genres; that Donne’s unified sensibility was really multiple and decidedly not philosophical, although he used philosophical ideas; that much of what is now taken to be peculiarly metaphysical or at least Donnian learning, from alchemy to religious iconography, was in its own day more or less common property; that supposedly unrelated ideas and images were less startling in an age that accepted the great chain of being and the divine unity and corres­ pondence of all parts of creation.^- The value of historical criticism to our understand­ ing of Donne was recognized early in this century by Sir Herbert J. C. Grierson, whose 1912 edition of the poems marked the beginning of the intense interest in Donne in the twentieth century. In the introduction to his edition, Grierson distinguishes between the approach of the literary historian and that of the lover of literature: For the lover of literature, literary history has an indirect value.
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